Bacillus Cereus is a rod shape bacteria that can be both harmful but also helpful to humans and animals. B. Cereus can cause illness from food. These illness can cause vomiting, nausea, diarrhea and toxin outbreaks, this usually comes from undercooked foods. This can cause dehydration. B.Cereus can also cause food poisoning. B.Cereus is also a spore forming bacteria. These spores are heat resistant. When one is affected with B.Cereus they will most of the time recover in less than 24 hours. So be carful about what you eat because it might contain B.Cereus!

This is a picture of B.Cereus form a chain of "rods" which is the streptobacillus shape

During our class we one day did a gram stain to see if our bacteria was gram positive or negative. We had a crystal violet stain. If the bacteria was gram positive than the cell walls would have appeared blue or purple because the cell walls of the bacteria are made up of a single layer of carbohydrates and proteins therefor it is easily penetrated by the crystal violet. If it was gram negative it would have appeared pink because because gram negative bacteria have an extra layer covering their cell wall which is made of lipids and carbohydrates that cannot hold the crystal violet and once the safranin color was added it became pink.

One day during class we did an antibiotic sensitivity test. During this lab we all chose four different antibiotics. I chose streptomycin, ampicillin, penicillin, and hand sanitizer. We put a little bit of the bacteria in each of the four quadrants (one for each antibiotic) and left them their for 24 hours. The next day when I came back to class I was surprised to see that streptomycin had the largest zone of inhibition (the diameter of a circle telling us how useful the antibiotic was) with 30 mm while everything else was somewhere around 0-2. So after this experiment I found out that if I had a patient who was infected with B.Cereus I would treat them with streptomycin.

This is picture shows B.Cereus ( letter B) and if it is motile or not if it is motile it would be cloudy

B.Cereus is mostly found in Fried Rice and can cause Fried Rice Disease